In Furor Over Prize, Novelist Speaks Up For His Language

By SARAH LYALL,

Published: November 29, 1994

GLASGOW—
No sooner had James Kelman's novel "How Late It Was, How Late" won this year's Booker Prize for fiction than a full-scale furor erupted. One of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, declared that the book was unreadably bad and said that the awarding of the prize, Britain's most important, was a "disgrace." Simon Jenkins, a conservative columnist for The Times of London, called the award "literary vandalism." Several other critics sniped that the book should have been disqualified because of its heavy use of profanity.

Meanwhile, the British literary establishment huddled together defensively as Mr. Kelman appeared in a business suit at the black-tie Booker affair and, in his heavy Scottish accent, made a rousing case for the culture and language of "indigenous" people outside of London. "A fine line can exist between elitism and racism," he said. "On matters concerning language and culture, the distinction can sometimes cease to exist altogether."

Part stream of consciousness, part third-person narrative, sparsely punctuated, devoid of chapters and written entirely in the words and cadences of working-class Glasgow, "How Late It Was, How Late" does make for hard reading, which seems to explain some of the objections. But other critics have greeted the novel, the story of a down-and-out Glaswegian former convict who has a run-in with the police and wakes up to discover that he has suddenly gone blind, as a literary triumph. Writing in The Independent, Janette Turner Hospital called Mr. Kelman a "poet and magician" and said the book was a "passionate, scintillating, brilliant song of a book."

It is nothing new for Mr. Kelman's work -- which includes four other novels, a number of plays and about 100 short stories -- to generate strong reactions, both for and against. He has been compared to James Joyce, to William Kennedy and to Samuel Beckett, but when the first Kelman short story was accepted by a magazine at York University in 1972, the printer refused to print it because of the profanity. And in the mid-1970's, one publisher urged him to write more accessibly, saying, Mr. Kelman recalled in an interview in his home in a suburb of Glasgow, that "work written in Glaswegian dialect doesn't sell in America."

For the author, a slight man with haunting eyes and a grave manner that gives way easily to sardonic humor, the central issue is cultural imperialism through language. Recalling times when Glaswegian accents were banned from the radio, or when his two daughters were reprimanded in school for using the Scots "aye" instead of the English "yes," he said it was wrong to call the language of his work "vernacular" or "dialect."

"To me, those words are just another way of inferiorizing the language by indicating that there's a standard," he said. "The dictionary would use the term 'debased.' But it's the language! The living language, and it comes out of many different sources, including Scotland before the English arrived."

As angry as he might be about the criticisms, Mr. Kelman said that the Booker Prize had given him a useful opportunity to air his views about language and about the disenfranchised people who are his subjects. It has helped the book sell more than 20,000 copies in hard cover in Britain, and it certainly has raised the author's profile among publishers in the United States, where "How Late It Was, How Late" is to be published by W. W. Norton on Dec. 12.

The $30,000 prize has also had happy financial consequences for the often broke Mr. Kelman, who left school at the age of 15 and worked at a number of manual jobs even as he began writing some 20 years ago. Having spent his life in a series of apartments, he was able to move six months ago to a large house with its own garden. He has also invested in a new computer to replace his creaky grime-covered one, and his wife, a social worker for homeless people, has been able to reduce her working hours. What's more, Mr. Kelman said, the Booker brings a special kind of prestige to someone like him, one of a group of strong writers to emerge from Glasgow in recent years, including Jeff Torrington and Alasdair Gray.

"The meaning of the prize comes from other people," said Mr. Kelman, who chain-smokes cigarettes that he rolls himself. "I was aware of its importance from writers both from this community in Glasgow and the extended community in Scotland, and also other communites that you could say were in similar situations. Friends of mine who are Afro-Caribbean or from India or Pakistan, or Irish or American people, said they were amazed, astonished and delighted that this statement could have been made from the center of the city of London."

Particularly annoying to Mr. Kelman (although Mr. Kelman does his best not to look annoyed) has been the renewed criticism that his writing is shoddy and somehow subliterary. Referring to Mr. Kelman's protagonist and narrator, Sammy, Mr. Jenkins of The Times, for instance, said the book represented "the ramblings of a Glaswegian drunk." And another journalist took it upon himself to count how many times a particular obscenity appeared in "How Late It Was," arriving at the impressive number of 4,000.